


Blue Ink

by KatyaMorrigan



Category: Lore Olympus (Webcomic)
Genre: Domestic Bliss, F/M, Holding Hands, Mutual Support, School, Working Hard, and secretly tries to help all of the time, hades makes sure she takes care of herself, mentor Hades, persephone works hard, wholesome as fuck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-22
Updated: 2020-11-22
Packaged: 2021-03-09 21:43:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,402
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27672872
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KatyaMorrigan/pseuds/KatyaMorrigan
Summary: Persephone works hard between balancing her goddess duties, internship at Underworld Corp., and college studies in Olympus. So it's a right pain in the butt when she gets hand cramp while studying back at Hades' house. Thank goodness her boyfriend is always too willing to drop everything and help her out.
Relationships: Hades/Persephone (Lore Olympus)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 88





	Blue Ink

**Author's Note:**

> Day 20 of my NaNoWriMo writing challenge this year - one oneshot a day, every day for the whole of November. I'm following the SOFTober 2020 prompts by @wafflesandkruge on Instagram to give me some fluffy starting points for the coming month of fics.  
> The prompt for today was "notes".  
> I hope you enjoy!

It was hard work keeping up with studies and also trying to be a responsible goddess, but Persephone was getting closer to finding the balance. Travelling back and forth from Olympus to the Underworld to the mortal realm in order to help her mother with duties left her with increasingly limited time to herself, especially with Artemis around to make sure she did her share of the housework. But today was a rare off-day, and Persephone was glad of the opportunity to spend her time with Hades.

They both had work they needed to do – Persephone had class notes that needed elaborating on with the help of her textbooks, and as always, Hades had an unlimited email inbox that refilled itself as quickly as he depleted it. Persephone was perched at the end of his kitchen island across from him, each with a laptop in front of them.

Mind you, Persephone grimaced as she tapped the screen again, hers was in decidedly worse condition. But it still worked, albeit with some necessary prompts every time the pixels flickered and turned the website she was referring to into a kaleidoscope of unreadable smears. Hades had offered to buy her a better one, but while she was also interning at Underworld Corp. it was unfair for her to accept additional help from its CEO. He had argued that every employee needed the right tools in order to do their job properly, but Persephone reminded him that the laptop was useful for her schoolwork, not the filing of shade profiles that she did only in the office and on their industrial formatting computers.

“Feeling restless, little goddess?” came the deep voice from the end of the island. Persephone peered over the top of her laptop and saw Hades regarding her kindly. He had folded down his laptop screen and was leaning on one hand.

“There’s a lot of chapters on this,” she admitted. “I think I’ve gone through most of the crucial points, but I want to make sure I really understand this before we get set an essay.”

“Are they assigning you work you can feasibly manage with your time?” Hades asked. He was always concerned for her, always ready to step in and have changes made to ensure she was living as happily as possible. It made her heart soft to think about.

“It’s a stretch sometimes, but I’m also the only person in that class with godly duties and an internship as well as a college degree to get through.”

“Well, if you need permission to miss exams or be excused from homework—”

“Ah buh buh,” Persephone interjected with a raised finger. “No special treatment.”

Hades smiled at her, a slow lopsided smirk that showed his teeth.

“You are in my house. That already breaks the rule.”

“Okay, we can also be friends outside of work.”

“Just friends?”

Persephone giggled.

“No. Not _just_ friends.”

She turned back to her laptop screen, jiggling the hinge a little to get it to light up once more. Darn it, now it wasn’t connecting to the WiFi either. Hades was blessed with the fastest internet in the Underworld – no surprises there – but still her rickety old laptop liked to play dumb sometimes. Persephone gave it another wiggle, and it finally reawakened.

They sat together in the quiet, the sounds of clicking keys and Hades’ email notification the only noise in the room. Occasionally there was the clack of Cerberus’ claws on the hard tiles as he came in to whine at Persephone’s feet for treats, but other than that, there were no disruptions. Persephone pushed her laptop forwards so that she could balance a notebook in front of her too, and started to take down physical notes of everything she had been researching. Although she technically understood the benefits of keeping all her work digitally, in practise she was against it. Why trust all her hours of writing and reading to a machine as temperamental as hers when she could instead copy it by hand and keep it in the lovely neat binder that Demeter had bought just for this purpose. Hades had once started a debate over the environmental impacts of paper notetaking as opposed to keeping everything virtual, and that was the closest Persephone had come to calling her mother and insisting she take her away from this blaspheming chthonic meanie. Paper notes were just better! It was more grounding than seeing her words lit up on a screen, and besides, her whole job was keeping plants growing as they should. The stationary industry had a lot to thank her for.

All the same, writing by hand was definitely more tiring. Persephone had to readjust the grip on her pen a number of times as she continued copying down everything from the webpages she had been assigned, as well as the sections of the textbook that had been most helpful. This was all background info, and most of it wasn’t strictly necessary for the upcoming assignments. But Biochemistry fascinated Persephone, and there was no such thing as knowing too much. Every piece of work she was set prompted more research and more fascinating topics, which in turn took her down more and more metaphorical rabbit holes until she knew more things about alternate theories about the creation of the universe than the molecular structures she had meant to have been reading up on.

As Persephone turned another crinkled page covered in her curvy biro handwriting, she felt a twinge in her right hand. She gave a little gasp and stretched it out carefully, grimacing at the pain.

“Anything the matter, sweetness?” Hades asked.

“No, nothing,” she smiled. “Just a bit of hand cramp.”

“You know you wouldn’t have to worry about that if you just—”

“—Typed up my class work, yes.”

They both grinned, but Hades’ gaze dropped to her little pink hand which she was still stretching out with subtle winces.

“Have you strained it badly?”

“I’m pretty sure I’ll be fine,” Persephone assured him, “I’ll take the writing a bit slower. You can go back to your emails.”

“As long as you’re sure, little goddess.”

He turned back to the screen and Persephone dropped her hands below the counter so that he couldn’t see her frantically massaging the muscles in her palm. Every rub was sending little spasms of pain up her wrist, and she was beginning to wonder if this was more than just a bad cramp from writing too much too quickly.

Taking a deep breath, Persephone picked up her pen again and tried very slowly to complete her sentence. _Internal… structures… of a… xylem… vessel…_ It was too much. The pressure needed to make the ink flow was just enough for her fingers to tremble and disrupt her normally neat handwriting.

“Okay, you are absolutely not doing okay over there,” Hades said, getting up from his seat and walking over. He smoothed down his jacket as he walked over and crouched down beside the stool that Persephone was sat cross-legged on. “I can see you pulling faces from over here.”

“I wasn’t pulling faces,” she protested, but she could feel her cheek warming. “Okay, fine. I didn’t want to stop you from working.”

“Sweetness,” he said, pulling her small bruised hand into his two blue ones, “my emails can wait a little longer. Gods know I have enough of them. Now, what is the problem?”

“I wrote too much and now I can’t write any more.”

Persephone looked up at him with self-aware disappointment. It was exactly what he had always said would happen. But his expression was sympathetic, and only a little bit amused. “Don’t say “I told you so”.”

“I won’t,” he grinned. “What can I do to help?”

“I don’t know,” she sighed. “I need to finish up these notes today ideally, but I don’t see how I can with my hand so screwed up.”

“Wow, those are strong words from you.” Hades’ mouth was pulled into another smirk, and Persephone shot him a narrow-eyed look before giggling. “Okay, but can you type up the notes still?”

“Not very well,” she admitted. “I don’t think this laptop likes me very much.”

Hades cast a look over the sellotaped corners, the missing keys, and the large crack that ran across the screen diagonally.

“I don’t think your laptop likes anyone much,” he remarked. Hades leaned over her and started pressing buttons on the keyboard, trying the touchpad and finding that it didn’t work. The corner of his jacket fell forwards and brushed across Persephone’s thigh, making her shiver. He was so close to her, she could smell the cologne he wore on work days. She resisted the urge to throw her arms around his neck and pull him into a hug.

“Well,” Hades said, pulling back from her laptop so that she could see the flickering screen turn another assortment of unhealthy colours, “it does seem reluctant to even let me open a typing program. I don’t think you can do much more than turn it on.”

Persephone sighed and slumped back in her seat.

“What else can I do then?” she whined. “I can’t not do the work!”

“What if I wrote your notes for you?” Hades asked.

“Hm?”

“You say everything you want to write, and I’ll copy it down. I promise I can make my handwriting neater.”

“Are you sure?” Persephone asked. “I have a lot of notes, and you have work to be getting on with—”

“Little goddess,” he replied, his voice stern, “I’m going to have to ask you to stop talking about my work at the dinner table. I can catch up with the emails at any time. Alternatively, I can sling them to Hecate and make her deal with them.”

“I don’t think she’d appreciate that,” Persephone giggled.

“It doesn’t matter. You have notes to write, and your hand is incapacitated. I will be your scribe.”

Hades sat in the seat beside her, pulling the pad of paper towards him and picking up her pen. It was a sweet glittery one with a corn-on-the-cob charm dangling from the end, and it took Hades a moment before he noticed the yellow shimmery charm batting against his hand. The pen looked tiny in his huge blue grip, and Persephone tried not to giggle more.

“I’m going to get one of _my_ pens,” he said, leaving the room for a second. Hades returned with one of his steel-grey fountain pens that he used purely to look more organised than he really was. Persephone watched as he made himself comfortable on the stool beside her, hovering the pen over the page and looking at her with his chin in his hand.

“What is it you are writing about?”

“Well…”

Persephone began the process of dictating her notes to Hades falteringly, stopping every few words to amend them and make sure it was actually what she wanted to be reading back when it came to her class the next day. Hades copied them out as neatly as he could, blowing on the paper to dry the navy blue ink every few seconds before resuming. He held her sore hand in between sentences as well, only letting go when he needed to hold down the corner of the paper or turn to a new sheet, and it was incredibly endearing to sit hand in hand with the god she loved, with his blue thumb massaging her pink palms as he copied out her schoolwork as instructed by her.

There was far more left to write about than Persephone had thought, and it was on some pretty complex topics. But whenever she struggled to work out how to phrase things, she would turn back to her textbook and get Hades to take a look as well. He would agree with her on the best way to convey the necessary information, and then continue as she took back over. Pages and pages went by in a blue blur, and Hades himself had to stop every so often to flex his fingers before continuing. But there was no hand cramp for him, and before she knew it, Persephone had a complete set of notes about everything she needed.

“Read through it for me, sweetness, and let me know if you still need any more help.”

Persephone skimmed the pages, checking she had included all the subheadings, and concluded that there was nothing left uncovered.

“Thank you so much babe,” she said gratefully, squeezing his hand. “I don’t know what I would have done without you.”

“You could always have asked the professor for an extension on the work.”

“Well yes, but you offered to help me so kindly, and this was… pretty nice.”

Persephone smiled at Hades, and he gave a warm grin back. He stood up from his seat and pulled her against him, pressing her cheek against his stomach and running a hand down her back.

“It was no trouble at all, little goddess. I am always here to help you, however it is you need it.”

Hades leaned down and pressed a kiss to her curly head before going back to his own laptop.

“Do you need _my_ help with your emails?” Persephone asked with a grin. He chuckled.

“I have a feeling you are more likely to distract me from it than to help.”

Persephone spent the rest of the afternoon helping Hades by not bothering him while he worked, playing with Cerberus in the yard and generally keeping the dogs entertained. She chipped in with her thoughts from time to time and allowed Hades those small breaks, but did her best not to pester him too much. It was more likely that he wanted her to interrupt his work more often, but she wanted to do as he asked rather than assume that.

The next day, Persephone smiled as she removed her binder from her school bag and placed it on the desk. Her professor asked them to find the notes they had made on chapters seven and eight, and she turned to the little wad of paper covered in Hades’ spidery blue scrawl. She traced her fingers over the letters beside the margin, remembering his hand in hers as he had helped make sure she could come to this lesson fully prepared. Thank goodness she had Hades in her corner no matter what.

**Author's Note:**

> This was so freaking cute to write, I had so much fun making this the most wholesome thing in the universe. Hades is just the most supportive guy ever, we know that much (especially after Episode 132 dropped last night oop), and Persephone knows she can rely on him. I hope this was as pleasant to read as it was to write, and that you enjoyed it!
> 
> Tomorrow's prompt is "breath", and will be a Heartstopper-based Nick and Charlie fic.


End file.
